‘It’s just a picture,’ George kept saying to himself, as he tried to find a spot on the wall to display it. ‘It’s just a picture.’ Trying to somehow surprise it out of its power, reduce its impact on him, keep it from making his stomach tumble.
But he failed. And was happy that he did.
The door opened behind him. For one amazed moment, he thought it was Mehmet being unprecedentedly punctual, particularly after a weekend following whatever a ‘swing from Wicked’ audition might have entailed.
‘You’re early,’ he said, turning, the third tile in his hand.
But it wasn’t Mehmet. It was the man who had bought the second tile for such an extravagant sum. He wasn’t alone. A slightly plump but fiercely professional-looking woman was with him. Short blonde hair, expensive earrings and an open-collared shirt of a cut so simple and elegant it probably cost more than George’s refrigerator.
Her face, though. Her face was nearly desperate, her eyes blazing at George, slightly red at their edges, as if sometime this morning she had been crying.
‘Is this him?’ she asked.
‘This is him,’ the man said, a step behind her.
The woman looked down to the picture he was holding. ‘There are more,’ she said, relief flooding her voice.
‘Can I help you?’ George mustered himself to ask.
‘That picture,’ she said. ‘That picture you’re holding.’
‘What about it?’ George said, raising it slightly, ready to defend it.
And then the woman said a number that George could only ever really have described as extravagant.
After she finally, finally finished the last of the dreariest Essex queue counts in the history of dreary Essex queue counts, and after she’d picked up a cranky, under-slept JP from yet another Saturday with her father, who was weirdly distracted and mumbled something about getting back to his cuttings, and then having at last arrived home after going to two separate supermarkets to find the only kind of juice JP was drinking this week (mango, passion fruit and peach), there was a knock on Amanda’s front door.
She ignored it, as she usually did. Who knocked on the doors of flats these days? Salesmen, for the most part, explaining the sensual pleasures of double-glazing, or rosette-wearing fascists in summer hats seeking her vote in the next election or, once, in a Cockney variant so thick that even as an Englishwoman she had trouble following it, a man asking if she’d like to buy fresh fish from the back of a van. (‘Who would ever do that?’ she’d asked him.) It definitely wouldn’t be the building supervisor at least, not on a game day, and it was too late for the post, so when the knock came a second time she ignored it all over again.
‘Whatever happened to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, do you think?’ she asked JP, tucked behind 3D glasses in front of their decidedly non-3D telly. ‘You never see them much any more. It’s like they’ve passed into myth.’ She grabbed another handful of sticky toys to be tidied away. ‘Though probably not one of those myths with br**sts and bacchanals and swans having it off with maidens.’ She turned to her son, who had not answered, mostly because he was four years old and in front of the TV. ‘What do you suppose a Jehovah’s Witness myth might be like, poo-poo? I picture quite a lot of lighthouses.’
‘Hush, Mama,’ JP said. ‘Wriggle dance!’
Which meant the Wriggle dance was coming up agonisingly soon on the Wriggle video download, danced by the childlike dinosaur Wriggles in their Wriggle costumes on Wriggle Beach under Wriggle rainbows springing forth from Wriggle applications on Wriggle computer pads. The dance involved very little more than wriggling, but JP was a fierce devotee.
The knock came a third time, along with a muffled call. She paused, a sticky action figure in one hand, a sticky fire truck in another. She debated whether to risk it, but that fish salesman had also been calling things as he knocked (‘Fresh fish!’ she assumed, but would it really matter?). She waited, but whoever it was didn’t try a third time. She dumped the toys into the toy box and, with a sigh, decided the room was clean enough and all she really wanted was to get her beautiful boy off to bed after his weekly call with Henri and watch crappy Saturday evening telly by herself with a cup of tea and some sarcastic tweeting to her sixteen followers.
‘Wriggle dance!’ JP shouted, leaping to his feet and commencing to wriggle vigorously.
Amanda’s mobile rang. She stepped into the kitchen to rinse the sticky off her hands before taking it out of her pocket.
The display read, to her mild surprise, Henri.
‘You’re early,’ she answered. ‘He’s–’
‘You are home,’ Henri said, his accent, as ever, a surprising combination of spiky and warm. ‘I can hear the television. Why do you not answer your door?’
‘It was unexpected,’ he shrugged over a cup of tea. ‘I am back on the Eurostar tomorrow evening, and we only come because Claudine’s mother got trapped in her hotel room.’
Amanda paused in her own tea-sipping. ‘Trapped?’
Henri made a dismissive Gallic wave. ‘For most people, this is surprising. For Claudine’s mother . . .’ He shrugged again, a burden he was willing to put up with.
(JP had been beside himself at Henri’s appearance. ‘Papa! Papa! Je suis tortillant! Tortiller avec moi!’ And indeed, Henri had been up for a bit of paternal wriggling. It had taken ages to get JP down to bed after that, but Henri had asked to do it himself, even giving him a bath and reading him a story – Le Petit Prince, of course – before JP finally drifted off. Amanda had even tried not to feel irritated at how pleased with himself Henri looked after completing the tasks she did daily to no audience whatsoever.)
‘So where’s Claudine now?’ she asked.
‘On her way back to France,’ Henri said, and Amanda thought there was nothing more French in the world than a Frenchman saying France. ‘Her mother is using my ticket. I could not get another until tomorrow.’
‘It took both of you to save her mother?’
Henri rolled his eyes as if asking for mercy from the gods. ‘You will have to believe yourself very lucky not to have met her. Your mother, so different, so English, so nice. I very much love Claudine’ – he was looking away so he didn’t see Amanda’s small flinch – ‘she is like the oboe playing Bach, but her maman . . .’